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Or so Eddie O’Sullivan says!

Eddie will be under massive pressure in the coming weeks to explain to the IRFU what happened during the disastrous run of results in France. Normally the fans celebrate, even under massive defeats (and we’ve all seen a few of those!!), but after the weekends performance some of the fans have turned on the coach and asked for his resignation.

There seems a world of difference between the RBS 6 Nations contenders and the team that went to France, yet they are the same squads - and O’Sullivan is set to stay for another four years, O’Sullivan believes the timing of the 6 Nations may be to blame for all of the 6 Nations squads underperforming at the World Cup.

“This team has played exceptionally well in the past and that’s the reason I’d say this isn’t irreversible,” he said.

“The World Cup has been a huge disappointment but we have to ask if this team can get back to where it was. In all confidence I say yes.”

“The window for the World Cup in September and that puts the northern hemisphere sides under severe pressure to get their A game together,” he said.

“If I could have changed things in the build-up, I would have played a lot more rugby in July and August.

“In retrospect, we might have learnt a lesson there. Maybe the Six Nations teams will say the next World Cup can’t be in the first month of the season.

“The southern hemisphere are now where we are in January. That’s not an excuse as we also feel we haven’t played to our potential.”

The exit has been made all the more difficult due to Irelands success in recent times…

“We were expecting a lot more from ourselves,” O’Sullivan said.

“The public were also expecting a lot more and that was because the expectation around this team was very high following an excellent 10 months.

“The team have created expectation and they must be given credit for that.

“It’s very easy to build a team up for the performances they’ve given, the commitment and the skills they’ve shown, and then when it goes wrong, use that as a bigger stick to beat them with.

“That’s the harsh part of this business but the lads accept and understand it.”

So where shold the inquest start? The Wallace vs O’Gara discussion? O’Sullivan clearly defends his position there despite O’Gara being off his game.

“If you are thinking about the selection from the off, Paddy would be our second choice fly-half and Ronan our first-choice fly-half and there has never been any secret about that,” he added.

“In terms of making substitutions during the game, that is something you have to make there and then on the run and if I thought Paddy was going to change the run of the game, I would have put him on.

“But I obviously have a lot of faith in Ronan. He has a lot of experience and these were huge pressure games. So we knew Paddy coming into the tournament didn’t have a lot of experience. So when you put a player like that into a game, you have to be sure that you put him in at the right time to have the right impact.”

Other players have offered their thoughts, Geordan Murphy said quite simply:

“We just weren’t good enough”.

“The simple fact is that we haven’t done well, we are going home and we have to go on from here,” he said.

“It does not matter what ideas we had about ourselves, or what sort of ideas anyone had about us before the tournament.”

Munster prop Marcus Horan said:

“We left ourselves with too much to do trying to get four tries against a team that has not conceded a try in the whole competition,” said Horan.

“There are a lot of players in the dressing room who are hugely disappointed with the way we performed. “